


collecting conventions

by twelvemagpies



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Attempted Matchmaking, M/M, Modern Middle Earth, bilbo baggins puts the cart before the horse, dwalin and dori are once again the only two with common sense, how hard can this be? asks local group of dwarves filled with hubris, sort of pre-bagginshield tbh, where the cart is his in-laws and the horse is a king
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21726283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twelvemagpies/pseuds/twelvemagpies
Summary: Balin, Nori, and Dori teach Bilbo how to carve a pipe, plait a braid, and steal a heart. In that order.
Relationships: Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield
Comments: 17
Kudos: 119
Collections: Have A Happy Hobbit Holiday 2019





	collecting conventions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LadyLaran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyLaran/gifts).



> local asshole writer goes off the rails, decides to attempt modern ME while getting very sick (apparently being very sick makes me write in the tone of a children's storybook author with too many Opinions™, but do with that what you will, i don't know if i'll ever be able to recreate it lmao)
> 
> this is a gift for the lovely LadyLaran as part of the holiday exchange! your prompt was a lot of fun and i hope you like it!

"And you're sure this is—" Bilbo scowls at the fragile scrap of paper in his hands, dirty from travel and worn from folding, "that this is allowed? I won't make it all the way to Erebor just for you lot to pitch me off the mountainside for treason, will I?"

"I should think not!" Dori replies waspishly. Which is an awfully big turn-around for someone who, at the start of this whole crazy adventure, had boasted to Bilbo that the total amassed knowledge about dwarves and their culture only filled three pages of a search engine.

"Yeah," Nori adds from his seat on the back of the ATV, "throwing you down the mountain is pretty archaic. More likely you'll end up in a jail cell at the bottom of a mineshaft until we clean the place up enough to stage a trial."

Bilbo would better appreciate the vehemence and fury with which Dori whirls on his brother, throwing the closest thing at hand (a full can of beans, according to the blur of the label as it smacks off Nori's forehead and rolls to a stop at Bilbo's feet), if all the blood in his body wasn't currently roaring in his ears. As it stands, he nearly jumps out of his skin and hotfoots it back to the Shire in a blind panic when a heavy hand falls on his shoulder.

"He's only teasing, laddie," Balin tells him as Bilbo clutches at his chest.

“I should very much hope so,” Bilbo grits out and regrets, not for the first time, agreeing to go on this bloody, half-baked notion of a quest in the first place. Let alone that they were calling it, with absolutely no trace of irony, a _quest_ in this day and age—but then, Bilbo was discovering that everything about dwarves was like that. Anachronistic and impenetrable and deliberately, teeth-gnashingly obtuse.

This is, of course, not to say that Bilbo Baggins doesn’t rise to a challenge (or, Yavanna forbid, to the basic social mores of polite company), though that mostly meant frantically trying to look up everything he could about dwarven culture in the brief moments they’d lurked close enough to a town to get signal. Or at least it had until they’d discovered that that’s how Azog was endlessly dogging at their heels, courtesy of some hacker calling himself the Necromancer whose mere mention made Gandalf scowls and the air around him crackle. Which wreaked utter _havoc_ on their electronics—magic and technology good bedfellows aren’t, and Thorin had needed to institute a twenty-foot sulking radius between Gandalf and the nearest piece of tech whenever the wizard was in a strop. (Which was often, and usually Thorin’s fault in the first place, so a subsequent twenty-foot radius between Thorin and a sulking Gandalf had to be established too.)

Not that Bilbo’s hurried trawling through every search engine under the sun had done him much good even before Nori spent an evening stripping all their phones down to the barest essentials. And fine, it’s not _that_ big a deal anyway, in the grand scheme of things. He’s earned his keep pretty well so far, saving the king and making a mean dinner out of canned stew and packets of ready-rice and finding a magic ring in the goblin tunnels that he really will tell them about sometime soon. Thorin’s even held a conversation with him a time or two! And he only looks like he’s sucked on a lemon when Bilbo brings up going back to the Shire a couple of times, before Bilbo wises up and realizes that talking about _returning to his comfortable modern home_ to the dwarf whose kingdom has been lost to him for longer than Bilbo’s been _alive_ is, in fact, a grievous faux pas. 

(Bilbo, however, thinks that he has a small allowance of faux pas when it comes to talking to Thorin, because talking to Thorin involves looking at him and the way his brows furrow when he considers Bilbo’s points or how he blinks just before he understands a joke and a smile spreads across his face and _really,_ really how could anybody be expected to keep a level head doing that.)

And all things said and done, that leaves Bilbo here: three months into his long-awaited adventure, clutching a scrap of paper with the handful of important dwarven traditions he’d managed to glean, and a trio of dwarves who look keen on lending him a hand likely only because a betting pool has already been set up around it.

“We’re teaching you,” Nori shrugs, shaking Bilbo out of his thoughts, “so it’s probably alright.” When Bilbo looks less than convinced, Nori claps him on the back so hard he stumbles. The smack of his palm is so loud that across the camp Thorin turns to look at where they’re sat together. “Relax, I’m sure you’ll do fine.” 

Bilbo narrowly avoids taking a chunk out of his own thumb instead of the block of briar root Balin had put in his hands an hour ago, and from the way Balin carefully, steadily inhales Bilbo can tell that the old dwarf may perhaps be regretting his offer after all. “Sorry,” Bilbo mutters. To himself or to Balin or to the jagged, splintery outline of what ought to be a tobacco pipe, he’s not particularly sure.

“You’re doing alright,” Balin says.

Bilbo scoffs. “Now I know you don’t tell those sorts of lies to all your students, Balin. I’m sure Ori didn’t get to be the scribe he is by coasting on your platitudes!”

That earns him a chuckle. Balin reaches to adjust Bilbo’s grip on the wood. “You’d do well to remember I taught Fíli and Kíli their letters too. Those platitudes then were less for their learning and more for my sanity!”

Across the camp Fíli glances up at them, though he’s too far away to have heard what Balin said. Bilbo waits until he turns back to his conversation with his brother to scowl at the mess in his hands. He’s been at this for the better part of the evening and the outline has yet to really coalesce into anything distinctly pipe-like. The only thing Bilbo has going for him is the distinct lack of an audience, courtesy of Balin’s gracious timing. Bilbo had been aware of Thorin moving about the camp like he’d had a lightbulb over his head, drawing Bilbo in as he’d almost doused himself with lighter fluid along with their straggling campfire and nearly knotted the ties of his own pack into Kíli’s pack next to his. But Balin must’ve been paying attention too, because no sooner had Dwalin and Thorin strode off, he’d settled next to Bilbo on the boulder at the far end of camp with a knife and a block of wood (“Briar root, Master Baggins”) and assured Bilbo that there was really nothing to carving a pipe!

He can’t tell from Balin’s expression whether he’d bet for or against Bilbo in the betting-pool-that-probably-exists, but Bilbo can be content in his newfound knowledge that actually there’s _plenty_ to carving a pipe, and he is good at absolutely none of it.

“You know,” Bilbo says after a while, confident he can hold a knife and a conversation at the same time as he tries to hollow out the bowl, “I think the last person I saw carve their own pipe was my grandfather. Mine I’m sure was made using a big complicated machine in some workshop in Bree.” A clever flick of the knife peels a curl of wood from the rim of the bowl and Bilbo takes a moment to feel accomplished. “I’ll admit that I’m much better at handling the other end of one of these!”

“The other end of what, laddie?”

Dwalin’s booming question precedes the dwarf by mere moments. Bilbo scrambles to hide the pipe behind his back as Dwalin stomps over, slinging his bag onto the seat of his ATV to rifle through it and mutter under his breath. (The ATVs they’d "borrowed" from some holiday house in the mountains were clearly meant for men, so Bilbo’s gratified that even Dwalin has some trouble.) “I thought you were with Thorin?” 

Dwalin spares him a withering glance before fishing, of all things, his pipe out of his bag. Leaning against the tire, he produces a tin of pipeweed and starts to pack it. “Thorin couldn't find his arse if his hands were in his back pockets,” Dwalin replies, teeth clenched around the pipe as he pats himself down for a lighter, “but I think he can handle the straight line from the creek to the camp on his own.” He grunts when Balin tosses him his own lighter and squints at Bilbo. “Though maybe you oughta give him a hand.”

The pipe-in-progress slips from Bilbo’s clammy hands and clatters down the back of the boulder, and Dwalin is at least merciful enough to pretend he didn’t hear anything. “Give him a hand?” Bilbo asks. “With what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure there’s plenty Thorin’d like for you to give him a hand with—”

“Dwalin!” Balin barks, with all the long-suffering exasperation only older brothers can possess. “We were in the middle of something, if you’d kindly find someone else to bother this fine evening?”

“Oh aye, were you?” 

The brothers glare at each with Bilbo caught like a fish on a hook between them, Balin arching one bushy brow and Dwalin smoking his pipe in a way that can only be called defiant. Finally, Dwalin relents, shoving off the ATV with a snort and stomping back towards the fire. “You’d be better off helping Thorin,” he tosses over his shoulder, “than hacking at that piece of firewood!”

_“Firewood?”_ Bilbo slides down the boulder the most dignified way he can manage, debating the merits of hurling his work at Dwalin’s head, knife and all. Next to him Balin struggles to smother a laugh into his beard. Bilbo figures it won’t be too great a loss. 

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry—” Bilbo drags a hand down his face as Nori groans, “I really thought I had it.”

“How can you make all those fiddly knit things and be so _bad_ at this?” Nori demands. “I don’t understand!”

“If it’s any consolation, I don’t either.” Bilbo sits back against a bale of hay. A mouse the size of his foot rustles out of the hay to titter at him and run off; they’d need horses for this next leg of the quest, Gandalf had insisted, and Bilbo was loathe to see how big _they_ were. As he watches the mouse disappear into the shadows of the barn, Bilbo adds, surly, “And they’re crochet.”

Nori throws him a withering glance, dragging his fingers through his hair to rid it of the worst of the snarl. He’d put Bilbo to work with leather strips and bits of rope to get the weave and twist of the braids down, fiddling with it in the rare moments they could rest before Azog and his warg pack rounded the nearest hill and they were fleeing again. But now in the relative peace and security of Beorn’s home, Bilbo might as well have been tying knots the whole way because that’s all he’d managed to do to poor Nori’s hair.

“Oh, okay,” someone murmurs from Nori’s other side and Bilbo grits his teeth to keep from jumping. Weren’t hobbits the ones meant to be light on their feet, damnit! Ori leans against the wooden beam they’d squirreled themselves away behind, looking between Bilbo and Nori with the utterly insincere, wide-eyed innocence that only a younger brother can manage. “I’d thought Dori was joking.”

“Tell Dori to mind his own,” Nori snaps. 

Ori’s eyes only grow wider. Bilbo thinks his lip might even be wobbling. “I get the feeling,” Bilbo says, “that I’m missing something important.”

“You’re not missing anything,” Nori tells him, flapping a hand for his brother to kick over the pouch of combs and beads just out of Nori’s reach, “Ori’s just being a little _shite.”_

“I don’t need the internet to tell me that’s not true, Nori.”

“It’s really not that big a deal,” Ori assures him, sounding absolutely anything but reassuring, “For dwarrow it’s just—doing someone’s hair is something kept for family or, erm, _close_ relationships.”

Bilbo balks, pulling his hands far clear of Nori and his hair. On the heel of that impulse is one to stick his hands back in and make a real mess of it—that menace! Arseholes, the lot of them! For a _week_ Bilbo’d fiddled with those blasted ropes and straps and things, following along to an app on Nori’s phone that was _clearly_ meant for children, and not _once_ did anybody bother to mention he was more or less propositioning the dratted dwarf? “That sounds pretty damn important!”

Nori shrugs, nonplussed. “Nah, we’re friends and you’re just practicing. ‘S not like you’re trying to learn Khuzdul.”

(Not for Bilbo’s lack of trying, though he won’t cop to that—any translator he’d found online was just gibberish, and any website professing to offer lessons was usually shut down or blocked by the next day.) 

“Besides,” adds Ori, blessedly unaware of Bilbo’s guilty conscience, “It’s not like if Bilbo’d gone and asked if he could do up Thorin’s hair.”

“Oh, exactly.”

“That’d be something else for sure.”

“For _sure.”_

“Again,” Bilbo bites out, more than ready to see if the third brother in this batch would be better company, “seems like something important and I are just not making an acquaintance!”

Nori turns to fix him with the same wide-eyed stare as Ori and _oh,_ how Dori didn’t drown them both in the tub in all those years Bilbo can’t possible fathom. “Thorin just has a lot of hair, that’s all,” Ori tells him earnestly, and if coin swaps his and his brother’s hands as Bilbo huffs and storms away, Bilbo will sort out his revenge later. 

Dori arches an eyebrow as Bilbo flops onto the sack of grain next to him. “Make a good pipe?” 

“Hmmrgh.” 

“I see. Fascinating. Well, I’m certain Nori teaching you to plait hair went _much_ better.” 

“Hnnnph.” 

“Right.” Dori taps away on his tablet for an idle minute. From Bilbo’s vantage point, face-first into burlap, it sounds like he’s playing a game. “Bilbo, have you,” the dwarf starts again, “have you considered just _talking_ to Thorin?” 

_“Talking?_ To Thorin?” Bilbo splutters. Fighting his way upright against a sack of grain is much harder than it looked while his heart is also intent on climbing out his throat. “W-What—What do we need to _talk_ about?” 

“To start,” Dori glances at him out of the corner of his eye, and Bilbo is suddenly certain that this is a list Dori’d been cooking up for a while, “about how you’ve decided to learn some random, archaic dwarrow traditions, allegedly to better understand our ways but I suspect also because I’ve seen you looking at Thorin’s arse—” Bilbo makes a horrid choked noise in the back of his throat and considers stuffing his head into the sack “—and if it’s any consolation, Master Baggins, I’ve also seen him staring at yours! So I think there’s rather plenty for you two to talk about.”

Oh, Bilbo died. Bilbo died in the goblin tunnels, smacking his head on the rocks or drowned by that vicious little maniac he’d riddled with. This is all just an elaborate, agonizing figment of his dying imagination to punish him for all the times he did actually stare at Thorin’s arse. “I really, really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“So you just decided to learn about dwarrow life out of the goodness of your heart, then?” Dori shakes his head. “No, don’t answer that, that wasn’t fair. Knowing you, there’s a good chance you _did_ learn because you wanted to be polite but I’m willing to bet,” he glances up at Bilbo again with a significant look, “that a decent part of all that was to stick it to a certain bullheaded twat of a king who’d come barreling across your doorstep without a kind word for you _or_ your house.”

Bilbo reels. “I’m—I’m pretty certain calling your king a bullheaded twat is treason.”

Dori scowls at his tablet as it chirps at him. “Oh and what’ll he do, take my phone away?” When Bilbo has no response to that, Dori looks pointedly in the direction Thorin had gone nearly an hour ago. “Well? Off you pop, then.”

Forget the wargs and dragons and men who turn into bears, it’s Dori who’ll haunt Bilbo’s nightmares long after this whole merry adventure is over. “Dori, I—”

“Or I’ll be telling Gandalf, and we’ll see how quickly he sorts you out.”

“—am going to find Thorin right now.”

Much to Bilbo’s chagrin, finding Thorin in the vast swathe of land Dori had gestured at turns out to be incredibly simple. He’d seen Bilbo coming all the way from the barn from his seat on a toppled tree, one knee propped up against the bark so he can rest his elbow on it. Thorin doesn’t say anything as Bilbo makes his way over, letting him scramble up the trunk to find a comfortable seat in his own time. The silence is…..nice. Perhaps it’s the promise of safety, at least for a handful of nights, that takes the bitter, strained edge out of the quiet. 

Or maybe, Bilbo thinks, Thorin had been busy staring at Bilbo’s arse. 

For lack of something to do Bilbo helps himself, packing and lighting the unminded pipe sitting off to Thorin’s side. And after a moment’s pause to gather up his remaining vestiges of courage, he clears his throat and offers it to Thorin. 

Thorin takes it and blows a wobbly ring of smoke before commenting, “My nephews tell me you’re trying to learn to carve a pipe.”

Those little bastards. “Aha, well yes."

“And to braid hair?”

“Oh, that. Yes, I, erm—an attempt was made.”

Thorin hums, taking another deep breath of smoke. “And what’s interested you in these old dwarrow things, Master Baggins?”

You, Bilbo doesn’t say, you and everything about you and everything you’re fighting for. You, because it means something to you, to all of you, across centuries and ages and _you_ mean something to me now, all of you. “I’m broadening my horizons,” Bilbo says instead. “You can’t find anything like this in the Shire!”

Thorin arches an eyebrow but he doesn’t argue. “I seem to recall your home having a fairly good Wi-Fi connection.”

Bilbo’s jaw drops. Thorin Oakenshield, King in the Blue Mountains, hero of the Battle of Moria with nothing but a piece of wood against heavy artillery—making a _joke?_ “Turns out watching life pass you by in books and films is quite a bit different than living it,” Bilbo replies tartly. “Quite a lot more being _damp,_ the latter.”

Thorin laughs at that, head tucked to his chest and shoulders shaking. But he doesn’t disagree; they lapse back into an easy silence, passing the pipe back and forth and each trying to outdo the other with bigger and wobblier rings of smoke.

“I’m sorry, by the way,” Bilbo adds after a while, staring out across the field of clover. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Thorin turn to look at him. “For before—bringing up the Shire and blathering about going home all the time, it was rude.” He manages a weak chuckle. “You’ll have to pay me back in kind when all this is over! Come by for dinner and talk the entire time about how you can’t wait to get back to Erebor again.”

Thorin is quiet for long enough that Bilbo sneaks a look at him. He’s biting his lip, fingers twisted together in his lap and it’s so _endearing_ that Bilbo nearly misses when Thorin starts to speak. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” Thorin is saying, voice soft and still looking out over the flowers, “or imply that your home wasn’t worth speaking about. It’s only that speaking of it reminded me—” He turns towards Bilbo then and Bilbo jumps, caught looking. “It reminded me of how I will miss your company dearly when you go.”

Bilbo turns crimson to the very tips of his ears, jaw dropping. And Thorin is still _looking_ at him, soft and fond. “I—Well, that is, erm—” Bilbo stops and clears his throat. “I could stay. For a while. After—After we’ve sorted everything. It’ll be a while until the airports are sorted out I’m sure, after the dragon and all that, so I—I don’t have to leave right away.”

A smile curls warm and bright in the corners of Thorin’s lips. He unlaces his fingers with great deliberateness and rests one hand on the gnarl of bark between him and Bilbo. “I would like that.”

With just as much care, Bilbo rests his hand on top of Thorin’s and it’s an easy thing to shift so their fingers curl together. With his free hand, he picks up the pipe still burning merrily and passes it over. “I think,” Bilbo says, “that I would like that too.”

**Author's Note:**

> hobbit fic for me seems to be the thing where each fic is some new challenge i want to undertake with my writing, which is largely unintentional but ngl i'm pretty glad for it! this ended up being an exercise in a trope/scenario i've always really admired how others do but was always worried about trying
> 
> ......in any case, it seems to have gone alright and i'm over at [twelvemagpies](https://twelvemagpies.tumblr.com/) ~~if you wanna come tell me that it didn't lmao~~


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